Having been arrested for the murder of her husband and imprisoned by her cousin Queen Elizabeth, Mary Queen of Scots was in a extremely vulnerable position. Any correspondence between Mary and the outside world would need to be of the highest concealment, so she and her correspondent Babington utilized a nomenclature that consisted of code words and a cipher alphabet. After successfully exchanging messages using this system, both believed that this system would be strong enough to formulate a plan for her escape and Queen Elizabeth’s assassination. This false sense of security proved to be more risky and dangerous, as opposed to any lack of security or encryption.

In the case of Mary Queen of Scots, her trust in both her method of sending messages and in her seemingly weak encryption led to her arrest and subsequent execution. Their naive trust led Babington to even fall victim to the forgery of Thomas Phelippes, a man working in close quarters with Sir Francis Walsingham. Since the fact that her codes had be cracked was unbeknownst to Mary, she exchanged incriminating evidence and was ruthlessly killed instead of staying safely imprisoned.

Through the story of Mary Queen of Scots, Singh portrays the idea that while utilizing cryptography can work in favor of those wanting to keep information secret, it also can serve to do more damage than good. Sometimes making an attempt to keep something concealed is not necessarily better than no attempt at all. In this case, they missed the opportunity to be discreet in their messages and keep all serious information to themselves. Singh is not only giving important information about Mary Queen of Scots’ story, but also warning cryptographers that are unaware of the power of cryptanalysis that can break even the codes that they perceive to be secure.